from 17 to 22
The turbulent years force change, solutions
(Editor's Note: The following article presents a slightly different view of contemporary university problems. Nevitt Sanford is Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Problems, which he founded at Stanford in 1961. Joseph Katz is Research Director of the Student Development Study, which followed an entire entering class both at Stanford and at Berkeley through their four years of college with tests, questionnaires and interviews. The research was supported by grants from the United States Office of Education and the Danforth Foundation.)
That student values do not undergo much change during the college years and that these values tend to be conformist are assumptions which have been widely held for a number of years. Our own researches incline us to modify this picture. Although students do not change their basic value patterns in college, they tend to hold these values in a different way than before. Students typically start college with conceptions of who they are that are either rather unclear or unduly rigid. At the end of four years students find that they feel freer to have their own opinions and to take independent initiative in their actions. There is a marked decrease in dogmatism. The senior has become much more aware of the complexity of issues, and some of them now find it more difficult to talk with dad about serious things because, they say, dad gets too emotional and does not pay enough attention to the evidence.
In the case of political and social values, there may be an appearance of lack of change when actually it is probably a matter of most students never taking serious interest in these topics. Our students, both freshmen and seniors, rank very low in importance to themselves such activities as participation in the affairs of their community or activities leading to national or international betterment. In their interviews with us they would explain their lack of involvement by saying that they were not "crusaders." Our students' thinking was strongly focused in a "privatist" direction; they said that after graduation their careers and their relations with their future families would have first importance for them.
But one should not be misled into thinking that, because of this privatist orientation, the college years are relatively tranquil. Learning the tasks of adult life and preparing oneself for the assumption of adult roles are not easy, and the years between 17 and 22 are more or less turbulent ones for all students.
Serious self-doubt, uncertainty about one's acceptability to others, and anxiety about achieving independence characterizes nearly every student. The college confronts him with hitherto unprecedented challenges: hard academic work, the pressures of able and competitive peers on all sides.
At the same time he is moving near to making more or less irreversible occupational and personal commitments; that is, he must determine the course of his life's work and test and confirm his ability to be a man or a woman. No wonder these years bring their crises: sharp disagreements and fights with parents, breakups in relationships with friends, impulsive and erratic actions that sometimes shock the bystander. These crises manifest themselves dramatically only in minorities of students, but the actions of these few make overt a process that is shared by everyone. At the end of four years most students are much more capable of forming human relationships in which they are both sensitive to the needs of others and more able to maintain their own individual separateness.
THE PROCESS of establishing an identity of one's own is by no means completed by the time of graduation. We have found that many seniors hold off binding commitments. Some plan to enter the Peace Corps or other interim activities to gain needed time and perspective. Many who apparently have made a commitment, such as entering a graduate or professional school, turn out to have deep reservations. Thus a student may enter law school, not with any clear occupational goal but saying to himself that he still can go in many different directions after finishing and that in the meantime he will gain time and sharpen his mind. Women at the time of graduation have by no means settled the vexing problem of possible conflict between their own further personal growth and their role as wife and mother.
As we have indicated, our research seems to show that the area of greatest concern for most students is not the political and social one, but that of their personal and emotional development. Again and again,
from the freshman to the senior years, a majority of the students we studied expressed great concern about the achievement of emotional well-being, about being respected and liked by others, about love and affection. They said that these values were much more important to them than achievement of wealth, or even the pursuit of intellectual and artistic values.
A substantial minority—close to one-third of the senior men and over 40 per cent of senior women said that developing a personal identity would be a major task in their lives after graduation. Concern with oneself as a feeling human being and with one's identity mark the partially solved and the partially unsolved problems of the college years.
When we asked our senior students to what they attributed the changes that had taken place in them during their college years, they listed among major influences the following: the impact of their living group, being away from home, and close relationships with friends of the same and the opposite sex. (Our own observations confirm the student's self-estimate.) A major underlying factor seems to be the freeing of the imagination provided by the encounter with—and sometimes the shock of—difference. Students in college encounter peers from many different backgrounds with many different ways of doing things. They encounter outspoken teachers. Sometimes these departures from the conventional are of a simple nature, such as the freedom to keep odd hours or to indulge in a prank.
PARENTS, and sometimes college authorities, are overly fearful that students might follow slavishly the lead of some impulsive Pied Piper. In fact, however, students rarely adopt the values of the unusual people or ideas they are exposed to. Instead they use the experience to define their own lives in freer and more imaginative ways. Advocates of nonviolence do not usually turn students into little Gandhis, but they help them toward a more searching understanding of social and political processes. Here also lies one of the transforming influences of the classroom. Unorthodox ideas may awaken students to dormant possibilities in themselves and show them that it is possible to be daring.
SOMETIMES the shock of difference is too great, and students seek security in close association with people just like themselves. When the college makes a great effort at mingling people of all kinds during their freshman year, it should consider that here, as with many other educational procedures, good effects will vary with the student's readiness for the experience. Perhaps for many students the strategic time to encourage expansion of their interpersonal horizons is in the years after the freshman year. This, of course, would be a decision for college administrations to make, bringing to bear the point that, while our research is directed primarily to expanding the general theory of how personality develops, the findings may have immediate implications for college policy.
If, for example, the great majority of students, despite some appearances to the contrary, are not involved in political or social issues and do not expect to be in the future, it would seem that colleges, instead of being disturbed by occasional vivid manifestations of student "activism," should ask themselves what they are doing to encourage students to assume responsibility in the realm of public affairs. The primary need is to wake up students, not slow them down.
Again, consider the matter of campus rules, and the adolescent's characteristic mixed feelings about authority. Seventy-one per cent of our freshman men and 73 per cent of the freshman women agreed with the statement "most teenagers drink merely to defy authority." But only 31 per cent of the men and 19 per cent of the women agreed that "college students should be allowed to drink as often and as much as they like." Students, it seems, can't do without authority, nor can they do with it. It follows that the college administration should listen to their demands for the abandonment of rules, but not suppose that this is exactly what they want.
ON THE other hand, knowledge that students need rules should not lead to a piling of one upon another and to fresh efforts at strict enforcement. The question is, how do we encourage students increasingly to take responsibility for their own actions? This is a basic educational objective to which the making
and enforcing of rules should be directed. Probably this objective would be favored by student participation in the making of rules, by a graded relaxation of rules that accords with the student's developmental status, and by handling breaches of the rules in ways that will make the student more aware of his responsibilities. It would be favored by all educational procedures that enhance the student's independence and self-confidence and increase his awareness of himself as a citizen of a community.
These examples suggest that college policy might be better guided by theoretically-oriented studies of student development than by the kind of institutional research that asks its questions within the framework of the existing system and focuses upon one question at a time. The administrator is constantly in need of immediate answers; he rarely is in a position to give much thought to what caused the questions to be raised in the first place.
We have said little so far about intellectual development. The fact that students are far more interested in matters other than those of the mind does not mean that they do not work hard at their academic tasks. Nor does it mean that they do not develop intellectually. The cognitive skills they have when they arrive at college—how to study, to classify, to generalize—are expanded, and many students become highly capable of exercising criticism, challenging authority, and breaking down stereotypes.
WHAT IS particularly striking, however, is the student's tendency to separate his academic tasks from the rest of his life. It is not only that he downdragues the academic and the intellectual in his scheme of values, but also, when asked to say what college experiences have had the greatest impact upon him, he ranks ideas presented in classes well below a variety of experiences in the social sphere. Interviews reveal that many students fail to see the relevance of academic learning to their deeper interests and concerns. For a great many, academic demands are seen merely as stepping stones toward a career or simply as hurdles society puts in the way to test their obedience, endurance, and conformity.
This is the perennial challenge to educators: how to reach students, how to make the intellectual offerings of the college an integral part of their developing selves.
An attack on the problem must begin with recognition of the fact that the compartmentalization of the academic is not the fault of the students. They arrive at college, typically, with great expectations, with the belief that they will find answers to the great questions and acquire the means for realizing some of their ideals. They learn to segregate the academic, and they learn it from educators, who seem to have assumed that because intellectual processes can be separated conceptually—as they are, for instance, for purposes of psychological experimentation—they are separated in real life. It is our view, one that is well-supported in psychological theory, that the person is all of a piece, that intellectual, emotional, and characterological processes develop in interaction one with another.
IT FOLLOWS from this that where our main aim is to produce scholars, our major effort should be to create a community of scholars, offer the student clear and attractive models of scholarship, deliberately build his confidence in his ability to become a scholar, and give him freedom to be guided in his intellectual work by his curiosity.
Where our aim, in addition to producing scholars, is to produce educated men and women, possessed of such qualities as independence of thinking, the ability to make wise choices, social responsibility, taste and sensibility, and sensitivity to the feelings of others, we must learn to use the intellectual offerings of the college in new ways. We must know what students are like and relate what goes on in the classroom to their needs and concerns. We must challenge what they believe most firmly, discuss what they are most passionate about, give them the means for analyzing their nonrational behavior, show them how they can do well what they most want to do. To learn how to do these things with increasing effectiveness is a continuing challenge to educational research and experimentation.
- Stanford Today "17 to 22: The Turbulent Years" by Joseph Katz and Nevitt Sanford Board of Trustees, Stanford （ $ \textcircled{C} $ 1966 by the Board of Trustees of The Leland Stanford Junior University)